Comfort women, the Yoshida Report...the cardinal sin of anti-Japanese reporting that has not gone away
Sound Argument Monthly, October 2014
URGENT DISCUSSION
Journalist Yoshiko Sakurai
Journalist Kadota Ryusho
Rui Abiru, Editor, Sankei Shimbun Political Science Department
It is true that not only the people of Japan but also people worldwide, especially those involved in the UN, need to know.
It is a truth that Hillary Clinton especially needs to know.
An enormous amount of well-founded criticism is "unfounded criticism"...
Abiru: Mr. Sugiura, who has just come up for discussion, wrote the following on his front page.
'There have been unfounded criticism in some circles and on the Internet that the comfort women issue is a fabrication by the Asahi Shimbun.'
There is more than enough evidence and reason to believe that it is unfounded. Nevertheless, the Asahi wrote as if they were the victims. And they wrote that they were going to retract the article about Mr. Yoshida Seiji, but they wrote it in small print on the inside page and nothing on the front page. There is no headline. It seems to me that they wanted to cover up the story from the beginning.
Kadota: It is not Asahi that is receiving unfounded criticism, but the Japanese. Statues of comfort women have been erected around the world, and condemnation resolutions are being discussed in parliaments all over the world.
I wondered how the Asahi Shimbun would answer here, but on the contrary, it became defiant.
Sakurai: 'Unfounded criticism' means that I am surprised that you insist so much.
It is precisely the problem that the Asahi Shimbun fabricated, first of all, being moved forcibly and secondly, linking the Women's Volunteer Corps and the comfort women, which are two very different things. The Women's Volunteer Corps women were moved forcibly is shocking to the world, and the Asahi Shimbun was the flag bearer.
Imagine the reality of 'Volunteer Corps = Comfort Women,' which is a tremendous thing.
The Japanese military forcibly took girls who may or may not have graduated from elementary school to young women in their early 20s and turned them into " military comfort women," according to the Asahi newspaper.
Writing this kind of thing would enrage South Korean public opinion.
It would be strange for the Koreans not to be angry, and it's natural for them to be angry. Between Japan and South Korea, which could have been better, it was severely damaged. In that sense, Asahi needs to apologize to the Korean people as well.
Abiru: Asahi admitted to conflating comfort women and Volunteer Corps, but wrote that this was unreasonable and that there was little research. But that's not right.
You could ask your parents or grandparents, "What was the Volunteer Corps?" It's the kind of thing you can easily find out if you ask.
Kadota: It's common sense, you know because it is already at the level of a common reason for the female volunteer corps.
How on earth did they evaluate the information in "selling oneself for prostitutes"?
Sakurai: The feature article on Uemura's report says, 'We have discovered that there was a factual error in one part of the article,' and 'We regret the lack of corroborative reporting.
However, this is not the kind of story that can be put to rest with insufficient reporting.
In Uemura's August 11, 1991, article, the woman's name was withheld. But three days later, in Seoul on August 14, she gave her real name, Kim Hak-sun
, at a press conference, where she reveals, "My parents sold me for ¥40." "I was sold by my stepfather three years later. When I was 17," she said.
She later filed a lawsuit against the Japanese government, and in her complaint, she clearly states that she was sold to Kisaeng because of her poverty. It is the kind of statement that the Uemura reporter must have seen. I wonder how he would have assessed this critical piece of information that she was sold by her parents, even though he wrote a lot about it in his feature article.
On December 25, 1991, after the lawsuit was filed, Uemura wrote a widely reported interview with Kim.
In that article, Uemura did not write that she was sold out because of her poverty.
Looking closely at the context, I think it's safe to say that Uemura intentionally dropped the information that Kim was sold out.
The same is true of the Volunteer Corps.
He did not report the critical information that the Volunteer Corps had nothing to do with the comfort women.
That's how it has to be said.
Abiru: I'd like to say a word about this. In the Asahi special report, it is stated that there was no mention of "being sold to Kisaeng" in the tape that Mr. Uemura heard. Even if this were true, Uemura's article in August 1991 states that he was "taken to the battlefield in the name of the volunteer corps."
So, did Mr. Uemura hear on the tape that she was taken to the battlefield in the name of the volunteer corps?
Probably not.
I would have to say that there was a fabrication, after all. If this is not a fabrication, I don't know what it is. Asahi's feature article does not make that clear.
The expression "being moved forcibly" has been changed one after another in the Asahi editorial.
Kadota: In the particular feature, it is mentioned that the Seoul Bureau Chief initially provided the information, but I wonder why did Mr. Uemura of the Osaka Social Affairs Department take the trouble to travel overseas to cover the story in Seoul? It's different from a domestic business trip. It's unreasonable to expect us to believe that he didn't have a special relationship with his mother-in-law.
Sakurai: I have my doubts about that, too. It's an exclusive news story, isn't it? From a journalist's point of view, it's unthinkable for a reporter to hand over the Seoul Bureau Chief's exclusive story to another reporter. The feature article about Mr. Uemura says that he "did not use his relationship with his mother-in-law to obtain any special information." Still, the article he wrote was favorable to his mother-in-law's claims. With that in mind, the question of why he didn't write the information about being "sold by his parents" and why he wrote the article linking it to Volunteer Corps comes up even more strongly. There is no explanation of these points in the feature article.
Kadota: I think Asahi understands that being moved forcibly is the root of the problem. Is there being moved forcibly or not? It is the crux of Sex Slaves. As long as they are called "sex slaves," they must be forced to take a woman where she doesn't want to go, or confine her, or force her to have sex with someone she doesn't like by rape.
Without 'being moved forcibly,' it would not be 'sex slave' at all.
If that collapses, it will be 'What was the Asahi Shimbun's coverage so far?'
If there was no being moved forcibly, then I think the Asahi Shimbun would disappear.
So I think they're still trying desperately to defend this place and even haven't lowered the flag that there was a compulsion to do so.
The feature article does not include much in the way of live testimony from Mr. Uemura himself or the Seoul Bureau Chief. On the other hand, this kind of summary reflects Asahi's intention to settle the situation somehow and get through it.
Abiru: Looking at the Asahi editorial, around 1992, the article treated "being moved forcibly" as a specific premise. However, as being moved forcibly became more and more suspicious, the editorial regressed to 'being moved forcibly must have existed.' Eventually, they began to write that 'being moved forcibly' didn't matter, and finally, the term 'being moved forcibly' itself is no longer used these days.
Sakurai: It became coercion.
Abiru: This was a misrepresentation. I also think it is a taunt of Asahi's readers. They don't try to tell the truth. It has dramatically inconvenienced the people of Japan, but I think it's a genuinely insincere response.
The Fatal Logical Fallacy of the Verified Article on the Asahi Comfort Women Report
Sakurai: So that's precisely what Asahi's 'lowly skill' is.
The Asahi's verification article on the comfort women is also very cunning.
Let's take a look at the article on the front page of the morning edition of January 11, 1992, titled "Material showing military involvement in comfort stations.
In the verification, Asahi stressed that it was not intended to make a political issue out of the article by reporting it just before "Prime Minister Kiichi Miyazawa's visit to South Korea." However, the timing was right before the visit. I still remember it. The headline on the front page was a big, black one: "Military Involvement Materials Found.
Abiru: There were six headlines on the front page.
Kadota: That was quite a sight.
Abiru: Normally, you don't get articles that big.
Sakurai: However, when I read the "military involvement" article carefully, I found that it was about things like making people aware of hygiene and cracking down on bad businesses.
Abiru: As Mr. Nishioka Tsutomu often says, it was "benevolent involvement.
Sakurai: Mr. Ikuhiko Hata also said, "This is good involvement. Without this kind of commitment, the comfort station could not have been managed. However, when we look at the actual paper, the way it's written seems to overlap with the image of that involvement in the forced removals.
Abiru: That's right. On the bottom of the front page of that day, it says, "Military comfort women, mostly Korean women, said to number between 80,000 and 200,000...were forcibly taken away in the name of the Women's Volunteer Corps. There are three or four errors in the short, little-ten-line manuscript.
Sakurai: But the verification says that the government was aware of the existence of the documents before Asahi's report, so it wasn't the first time Asahi informed the government that the military was involved, and therefore the Japanese government knew that such documents existed, so it's not Asahi's fault that Mr. Miyazawa went to South Korea and apologized eight times for being upset about it.
It is a really cunning way to get away with it.
Abiru: The documents from the Cabinet's Foreign Policy Council at the time say that the Asahi report caused an uproar that it was as if someone had stirred up a hornet's nest.
Perhaps some people in the government grasped such documents as a matter of course.
But there is no doubt that the way the Asahi article wrote caused a great deal of commotion.
Sakurai: About Mr. Yoshida Seiji, who claimed to have done the "Forced Removal on Jeju Island," Asahi wrote that they could not corroborate his testimony in Jeju Island and said that they had no proof that Yoshida was false.
The Asahi Shimbun says, "That's why we marked it as unverifiable.
But the fact that none of the locals say "that happened" about Yoshida Seiji's testimony is proof that Yoshida Seiji's testimony is not true.
It may not have said, "What Yoshida Seiji said is a lie," but it said that there was no such thing as "a woman was taken, or a truck came and snatched 200 people by force.
That means that what Yoshida Seiji wrote did not exist, so it is false.
But here again, Asahi made a very painful excuse: "There was no proof that Yoshida Seiji's testimony was false at that time.
On the other hand, they have now concluded that the testimony is false, and they are retracting the article. So when did the Asahi determine that it was fake?
If it wasn't this August 5, how many years ago was it, how many decades ago was it, and what were they doing in the meantime?
There is no mention of it at all, and I have no idea.
Abiru: What's more, what's cunning about this article is that they wrote at least 16 articles and said they were going to rescind them, but which articles exactly are they canceling? There's almost no mention of which articles they're taking down. What kind of reporting have they done? What do they rescind, and what do they leave out? So they're secretly taking back articles in a way that the current readers don't understand.
Sakurai: They don't want their mistakes to be known as much as possible. I can see how they want to hide it as much as possible.
Kadota: One of the characteristics of the Asahi Shimbun is that they do their best to write about things that can be said to be the fault of Japan alone, but when it comes to the case of the 122 comfort women who filed a lawsuit against the South Korean government on June 25 against the U.S. military, for example - and I think this is a huge deal - they didn't do much about it.
There have been comforting women in various countries' militaries throughout history. In fact, they have existed in all ages and places, even to the point that the Crusaders were accompanied by a unit of prostitutes in the old days. The Asahi Shimbun has been reporting on this, leading its readers to believe that it is unique to Japan and that only Japan is to blame.
Abiru: However, in this feature article, Asahi has made a fatal logical error. What is it? They have written in their editorials that even if similar cases had occurred in other countries, Japan would not be allowed to get away with it just because other countries had not apologized. But this time, in the column titled "What about the reports in other newspapers?" they went out of their way to list all the reports in other newspapers, trying to say, "It's not just us.
Kadota: But in this special edition, they say, "It's not just me," don't they?
Abiru: That's right. It's like saying in an editorial that "the theory of 'It's not just me' is incomprehensible," but then saying, "It's not just me" when it comes to their own mistakes.